Deep Sky plans to capture CO2 from the atmosphere starting in March

Montreal firm Deep Sky plans to capture and store CO₂ coming from the atmosphere from next March.

On the sidelines of a press conference in Montreal on Tuesday, the president and co-founder of Deep Sky announced that the company would reach an important milestone in the coming months.

“In the spring, we will remove CO₂ of the atmosphere, we will store it and we will begin to reverse the concentration of CO₂ which is at the origin of global warming, nothing less,” said Frédéric Lalonde, in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“We don’t want to try a new technology in the middle of January in Alberta,” so “we wait for the snow to melt” to extract the greenhouse gases, he said.

An experimental laboratory

Last summer, Deep Sky set up a laboratory to test different carbon dioxide capture and sequestration technologies in Innisfail, Alberta.

Nearly 100 technologies from around the world would have been evaluated at this site, called “Deep Sky Alpha Lab” and which would be powered entirely by solar energy.

Deep Sky plans to eliminate 3,000 tonnes of CO₂ of the atmosphere per year at this site, an amount obviously too modest to have an impact on the climate.

The carbon dioxide capture industry is not yet ready to remove this greenhouse gas from the planet on a large scale, but Deep Sky’s goal is to test different technologies, to find the most promising and accelerate their commercialization.

“Some technologies will work and others will not” and through these experiments, we will “discover, in an empirical and real way”, the least energy-consuming, least expensive and most effective options, explained Mr. Lalonde.

An agreement with RBC and Microsoft

The dreams of the Montreal firm, which has obtained funding from the Quebec government, but also from the federal government, are attracting attention.

Moreover, the quantity of CO molecules₂ that Deep Sky plans to remove from the atmosphere starting this spring, no matter how small, will be counted and exchanged for carbon credits.

“We announced the participation of Microsoft and the Royal Bank of Canada as the first customers and all the carbon credits that will be generated by this site [le site d’Innisfail] have already been sold,” explained Frédéric Lalonde.

The agreement with the two customers provides for the initial elimination of 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ by Deep Sky and “the option to eliminate an additional million tonnes through the company’s future commercial projects”, according to a press release published a few weeks ago.

A legislative framework present in Alberta

Carbon dioxide captured at the Deep Sky site in Alberta is planned to be injected two kilometers underground, “where it will remain safely for thousands of years,” according to the company’s website.

“In Alberta, unlike Quebec, for the moment, it is legal and structured. There is a framework of laws for injecting CO₂ safely, underground. In Quebec, we are in the process of developing the protocol, so we went to set up in Alberta because we could immediately launch our operations,” indicated Frédéric Lalonde.

He specified that his company continues its exploratory projects in Quebec.

She recently carried out a pre-feasibility study to analyze the geology of the Bécancour region.

“We discovered a storage potential of millions of tonnes, under our energy valley,” said the entrepreneur.

The geology of Quebec and Canada, the capacity to sequester CO₂ as well as the natural resources found in the territory ensure that “we have the potential to be the Saudi Arabia of climate change”, according to him.

Because of “this potential”, according to the CEO of Deep Sky, “we have a moral responsibility to develop” the CO capture and storage industry₂ and “if we don’t do it, someone else will do it for us”.

A tool, but not a panacea

In a recently released report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognizes that carbon capture is an important tool in the fight against climate change – particularly when it comes to offsetting emissions from sectors that have no viable alternatives.

However, the report warns against “excessive expectations” and reliance on this type of technology.

The report also says that limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal the international community committed to with the Paris Agreement, would require 32 billion tonnes of emissions to be sequestered by carbon capture by 2050.

“The amount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than current global electricity demand,” reads the report, which adds that this amount of captured carbon would also require an increase in global spending on the technology , which would increase from 4 billion in 2022 to 3500 billion by 2050.

According to another report, written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which focuses on ways to mitigate global warming, a radical reduction in fossil energy consumption is necessary to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

The IPCC report published in April 2022 indicates that, alongside substantial emissions reductions, technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration offer significant potential to reduce GHGs.